


3am Whiskey and Pointed Conversations

by anythingbutplatonic



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: 4x16, Alcohol, Angst, Broken Hearts, Bros looking out for their bros, Drinking, Episode Related, F/M, Gen, Missing Scene Fic, Oliver/Diggle friendship, Wallowing in self-pity, dyla, episode reaction fic, friendship fic, olicity - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 12:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6375235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the going gets tough, the tough drink whiskey. Friends don't let friends endure break-ups alone. </p><p>A little John/Oliver friendship fic post-4x16. Episode reaction/missing scene fic for 4x16 "Broken Hearts".</p>
            </blockquote>





	3am Whiskey and Pointed Conversations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mimozka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mimozka/gifts).



Five minutes after Felicity leaves - leaves the lair, leaves the team, leaves _him_  - he’s reaching blindly for the bottle of Tennessee whiskey in the third drawer down on the right-hand side of her desk. The sight of the familiar gold-brown liquid in the cut-glass bottle is almost enough itself to start to calm the edges of the anxiety and pain clawing at his chest, his throat and eyes burning, everything feeling numb. 

“ _I don’t want to let you go.”_

_“But I’m already gone.”_

Oliver doesn’t bother with a glass. He doesn’t think he remembers where they are, anyway. Instead, he twists off the cap and swallows the fiery liquid straight from the bottle, like it was Coke or orange juice. It burns, but it’s a pleasurable kind of burn. Then he slams the bottle down onto the table hard enough that if the glass was any thinner it would have cracked, dripping whiskey like droplets of blood. 

Drinking excessively would be stupid. He knows that. But right now, he doesn’t want to be sensible.

Felicity’s gone, and that’s all there is to it. 

It’s like his whole world went dark once more when she put the engagement ring, his mother’s engagement ring, back into his palm and closed his fingers around it. Told him she didn’t want it, not anymore. 

Not ever, either.

Inexplicably, ironically, and with a force that makes him double over from the pain of it, he remembers his own words from almost two years ago.

“ _I thought I could be me and the Arrow, but I can’t. Not now, maybe not ever.”_

A bitter laugh, false to his own ears, escapes his throat and echoes in the empty lair. 

He snatches up the bottle and takes another drink. Then another. And then another. 

A quarter of it is empty now.

“Is there a reason you’re drinking that like mother’s milk?”

Oliver stops, braces his hands on the edge of Felicity’s - well, formerly Felicity’s, he supposes - desk. It’s John. He never even heard his heavy footfalls on the steps, or the _snick_  of the elevator doors sliding open. 

You lose sight of the environment, of your surroundings, when your heart is breaking.

Oliver uncurls his fist, shows Dig the ring. “She gave it back.” 

There’s sympathy, and understanding, in his friend’s eyes, for which Oliver is beyond grateful, when he shakes his head and says, “I’m sorry about that, man. I know how much you wanted her to come around. I shouldn’t have got your hopes up.”

Oliver shakes his own head, blinks to clear the tears from his eyes. “No. No, it’s not your fault. I - I should’ve-” But what exactly he _should_  have done, he can’t think. There’s too much _feelings_  ranging for attention in his head, in his heart, for him to make sense of them. 

“You’re not a bad person for wanting her to change her mind, Oliver. You’re human. And you love her. Of course you hoped she’d come back to you.”

Oliver sinks, without looking or thinking, into Felicity’s old computer chair. It scoots back across the shining polished floor from his weight; he closes his eyes, his head falling back against the lip of the chair, fingers twitching towards the bottle of whiskey once more. He throws the ring onto the table, where it clatters loudly. He resists the temptation to crack open an eye to look at it, not on Felicity’s finger but naked and abandoned. 

He hears Dig pull up another chair, sit down. He hears the clack of glass on glass and the sound of whiskey being poured. 

He opens his eyes. John takes a sip of his drink and says, “Did I ever tell you that when Lyla and I decided to get divorced, she told me it was over for good? That it would never work out, so there was no point kidding ourselves otherwise?”

“No,” Oliver whispers. “Felicity - she told me the same thing. She said there was no fixing what happened between us. That it was over...forever.”

John scoffs a laugh to himself, raising his glass in Oliver’s direction. “Exactly what Lyla said to me when she took off her wedding ring two months after we got back Stateside. She said, “ _Johnny, it’s not gonna work. It never will. We need to let each other go, now, before one of us ends up getting hurt._ ” Six weeks later, we were signing divorce papers.”

“If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re doing a lousy job,” Oliver quips, only half-serious. 

“It’s not about making you feel better, man. I don’t think much of anything can do that right now. But I’m saying that I get it. I’ve been there, done the whole ‘we’re over for good’ thing. It hurt like a bitch at the time, believe you me. I didn’t wanna believe that my relationship, my _marriage_ , was over forever. It’s a difficult thing to deal with and I don’t blame you for drinking your feelings.”

“I’m not drinking my feelings,” Oliver shoots back, defensive all of a sudden. 

“Mmhmm,” Dig replies, taking another sip from his glass. “The half-empty bottle on the table says otherwise.”

  _Damn._

John knew him too well.

“Look,” he says, “right now, things look pretty dark, am I right? You’re angry, she’s angry, you’re both in whole lot of pain that you don’t have the words to communicate, least of all to each other.  But it’ll pass. It _will_. You and Felicity, you’re.... _it_. That kind of love doesn’t turn itself off if one of you walks away. I know that from experience.”

“She seemed pretty adamant,” Oliver murmurs. “There is no _us._ There never will be again.”

“Heat of the moment, man. She’s hurting. And when people hurt, they say things they don’t mean. Like, uh, ‘you don’t trust, or love’,” John winces, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “I never said I was sorry for that, did I?”

“No,” Oliver says. “You didn’t.”

“Well, I’m saying sorry now,” he replies, “and Felicity will calm down and regroup, and she _will_  come back to you, Oliver. I know she will. I know Felicity, and she loves you, more than you could ever think or want to imagine. I also know that she likes to hit below the belt when she’s in pain. And I’m guessing she hit you pretty low.”

 _There will always be a part of you that defaults to the man on the island_.

“Did you always think you and Lyla would get back together someday?”

“No,” Dig replies, and his answer is honest. “In fact, after about a month, I resigned myself to living with my new situation and started moving on. If she said it was over, then it was over.”

But Oliver wasn’t satisfied. He had more questions - so many more questions. He needed to _know_ , if there was any sliver of a chance for him and Felicity, what it had been like for his two friends. “Did you love her, still, when you saw her again?”

“I convinced myself I didn’t,” he admits. “Tried to pretend that it was just for old time’s sake. A dinner here, a few drinks there, kisses on the cheek at the end of the night that I told myself were nothing but friendly affection. But I was so, so wrong. Lyla might have told me we were kidding ourselves when we got divorced, but what I _really_  think we were fooled by was thinking we could happier alone than when we _were_  together.”

Oliver’s eyes slip closed, as if he can’t bear the weight of his friends’s words; they’re like a knife in his chest, twisting in his ribs, cutting off his oxygen. 

What works for one couple didn’t always work for another. 

Finally, he reaches for the bottle again and takes a long drag, the burn of whiskey down his throat a reminder of where he is, who he is, a way of anchoring himself when he feels in danger of floating away entirely. He coughs, spluttering, and the wetness in his eyes is a mixture of the alcohol and his own tears. 

Dig drains his glass, but doesn’t go to refill it. Instead, he gets up, puts it on the table next to the bottle and the ring, claps a hand on Oliver’s shoulder. 

“I get how you feel, man. But you can’t lose hope. Not after everything you and Felicity have been through. And if you don’t feel like staying in that big fancy loft alone all the time...you’re always welcome at our place. I know Sara misses her favourite non-blood-relative uncle.”

At that, Oliver _does_  smile, for the first time in what feels like hours - maybe even days. He really hasn’t spent enough time with people who aren’t his sister, psychotic villains, disappointed wedding planners, or his ex-fiancee as of late. 

He doesn’t have that many friends. But the ones that matter are the ones he needs to make more of an effort to be with, and not just for vigilante work. 

“How about tomorrow?” he offers, taking the bull by the horns while it’s still within reach, and he’s not drunk enough to do something he’ll regret later. 

Dig nods, pleased that Oliver accepted the invitation. “I’ll let Lyla and Sara know.”

It’s not going to heal his broken heart overnight. It’s not going to perfectly smooth over the cracked walls of what used to be his and Felicity’s relationship. It’s not going to make the strong possibility of never working things out any easier to deal with. But maybe he didn’t have to be completely alone while he mourned the end of the best love he’d ever experienced. 


End file.
